I've been getting a lot of questions and comments about the forced resignation of an IT administrator in the Higley School District in Arizona. There's a lot of misinformation flying around, mostly due to poor reporting. First lets start with the facts we know: NEZ (Brad Niesluchowski) was an IT administrator at Higley school district. He allegedly installed and ran BOINC and attached to the SETI@home project. The district alleges damages of $1.2M to $1.6M because of the use of SETI@home both due to wear and tear on the processors and electricity usage. Niesluchowski claims that the district administrator has a personal vendetta against him.

Category: Questions about SETI@home

Q. Do I need permission from my employer to run SETI@home on computers at work?

A. Yes! Of course! We've been saying that for 10 years, and despite what some bloggers have said, Niesluchowski wasn't the first person to lose his job over this. The first time was many years ago.

Q. Does SETI@home really cost that much to run?

A. The cost of running SETI@home is not zero. When a computer performs calculations, it draws more power than it does when it is idle. A typical desktop machine might draw about 60 watts more when active than when idle which is about the same as an incandescent light bulb. If run 24/7, that machine will consume an additional 525 kilowatt hours (kW*h) in a year. At an average cost of $0.12 per kW*h, that's $63.11 per year. That's pretty small compared to the cost of your computer, and maybe about the same as your monthly cable bill, but it's pretty big compared to the cost of can of soup. At that rate, you could spend $1.6M on power by running 25,000 computers for a year, or 5000 computers for 5 years. This is in addition to the power usage of an idle machine, which can also exceed 60 watts. If a school district really wants to save power and money it should implement a policy to turn off computers at night. If SETI@home cost them $1.6M as they state, they would have saved $3.2M if such a policy had been implemented.

Q. Does SETI@home damage your processor?

A. I am not aware of any study that indicates that fully utilizing a CPU's processing power for a long period of time will cause it to fail sooner than it normally would, provided that the CPU is kept in the normal temperature range for operation. A CPU's temperature us usually controlled by a heat-sink and fan. If the heat sink or fan fails a CPU can be damaged whether SETI@home is running or not. Most desktop computers emit an alarm sound if the CPU fan fails. Most laptops and some desktops have a thermal protection system that slows down the processor if it overheats. If your machine is running slowly, check the fan.

Q. Does BOINC or SETI@home interfere with electronic whiteboards or their software.

A. Nobody has reported such a problem. In the past several days I have had many teachers inform me that SETI@home works quite when on machines that also control electronic whiteboards. I think this could fall into the next category of "Bad Reporting." Many articles said that SETI@home was discovered on these computers while looking for the reason that electronic whiteboards were shutting down after periods of inactivity. I didn't see any that indicated that SETI@home was the cause of those shutdowns. Most likely the whiteboard device drivers or their control software were configured in a way that allowed the computer to shut off their power after a period of inactivity. It is my understanding that there are also a lot of inferior electronic whiteboards that have been sold to school districts that are required to accept the lowest bid when purchasing equipment. That is also a possibility.

Q. Did SETI@home slow down other software as was reported?

A. Probably not. If BOINC is configured not to run applications while the computer is in use, it should not cause a slowdown of other software. If there's one thing IT personnel like, it's blaming slow computers on viruses, spyware, or "too much stuff on the hard disk." That might be the case, but those are just a case of poor computer maintenance by the IT personnel which is the most common cause of slow school or work computers.

Q. Does BOINC and SETI@home prevent you from installing a firewall?

A. No. BOINC and SETI@home do not require that a computer not have a firewall, nor does it require holes in your firewall settings. BOINC and SETI@home use the same IP port used by web browsers. If your firewall allows you to use a web browser, you can run SETI@home. Remote access to BOINC (which allows you to control the BOINC client running on one computer from another) does require a single IP port to be opened, but this feature is disabled by default. The district administrator, Dr. Birdwell, is mistaken if she believes that BOINC is incompatible with firewalls.

Q. Dr. Birdwell says "You can't just press a button" to uninstall BOINC and SETI@home. Is that true?

A. It depends. Do you mean literally true? Then yes, most computers ship without an physical button labeled "Uninstall BOINC." To uninstall BOINC, you do the same thing you would do to to uninstall any program. On windows that means click the "Control Panel" icon in the Start Menu. Then double click on "Add or Remove Programs." Then select "BOINC" and click the "Remove" button. That's five mouse clicks, but the entire process takes less than a minute to accomplish. Not exactly a button push, but I wouldn't place it in the "difficult" category.

Q. Does running BOINC or SETI@home make your computer susceptible to viruses?

A. If you download official BOINC binaries through boinc.berkeley.edu and attach only to reputable projects there is very little danger of getting a virus from BOINC or the project. In fact we are not aware of any cases of a computer getting a virus through BOINC or SETI@home in our 10 year history. You are far safer running BOINC than you are reading your email.

Category: Just Plain Bad Reporting

Q. I saw an article that said that SETI@home caused $1.6M in damage to computers a school district. Is that true?

No. In that article the reporter either mistook the legal concept of "damages" with actual physical damage, or was such a poor writer that they couldn't explain the difference.

Category: Questions We Couldn't Possibly Answer

Q. Did Niesluchowski have permission from a prior administrator to run SETI@home or to take computers home from work?

A. I don't know. How could I know that?

Q. Did the school district confiscate NEZ's family computers along with the district computers?

A. Beats me. Since I don't see it in the articles, but in comments to the articles posted by readers, I doubt that you can lend it much credence.

Category: My Personal Opinions (not those of my employer, of the SETI@home project, or of its participants.)

Q. What do you think about the district administrator, Dr. Denise Birdwell's comment that "We support educational research and we would have supported cancer research but we however as an educational institutional do not support the search for E.T."?

A. I think that Dr. Birdwell's comment is insulting to me, to the University of California, and to the millions of people who have run SETI@home in the past 10 years. Dr. Birdwell is ill informed about SETI, SETI@home and volunteer computing. I think its likely the cancer research she claims to support would probably not be happening if SETI@home had not popularized volunteer computing.

I would point out to Dr. Birdwell that the University of California is a world renowned educational institution, and that regardless of her opinions, SETI@home is still the largest volunteer computing project on the planet. I will also gladly point out that the NASA Exobiology program and the National Science Foundation Astronomy division apparently do not agree with her assessment.

That said, I'm not at all upset about the bad press she is sending our way. There are a lot of school districts in the world, and she only runs one. However, I do wonder whether the Higley School Board agrees with the opinions she espouses so loudly. @SETIEric

Thank you sir. I have been trying to follow this and have been reading about it on numerous websites. From what I've seen, even those articles in the press that paint SETI as the bad guy in this have a comments section filled with people defending us. At the same time many of the comments are not nearly as kind when speaking about Dr. Birdwell.

I did make a suggestion that after Nez wins his lawsuit he should donate a few new servers to the cause. :-)

Dr. Birdwell should be terminated for hiring his WIFE to replace Brad. A conflict of interest where he is now basically giving Brad's paycheck to himself. Someone should send Birdbrain and the cub reporter a link to the BOTD as a comparison of what is actually reliable information. ;)me@rescam.org

Uhhh misfit, I know it's hard to tell from the picture but Dr. Denise Birdwell is a female.

HA! Yeah it is hard to tell, I just figured that out from a video. In the original thread there was a link to an article where it was stated that his wife was hired as a replacement. Perhaps it was a different school official. (Or perhaps Arizona isn't California on the issues of marriage.)me@rescam.org

since some users were concerned about the bandwidth cost S@H might cost, maybe add this to the FAQ? Since my traffic is limited to 5 GB a week because I'm connected over the campus net of my university and they don't want to pay for more I'm carefully monitoring my traffic usage.

I found that Seti@home uses something below 20 MB/day. Just being logged in in Skype (no messages, not to mention video calls), uses more than 10 times of this. I think if you surf the web for half an hour you will already have used more traffic than S@H uses the whole day. (Just imagine all the bored students during the lessons! what damage would THEY cause) No surprise though since BOINC isn't permanently connected and connects about once in an hour for up/downloading WUs and doing scheduler requests.

Yes, a fully loaded computer drain mores energy than an idle one. No, it wont damage your cpu or any other hardware; I ran s@h for 10 years in hardly o/c cpus 24/7; none of them (more than 30 cpus) ever fail because of that intensive use; all of them where abused since day one and all of them retired because they where obsolete, after a prodly life dedicated to science.

Q. Does BOINC or SETI@home interfere with electronic whiteboards or their software.
A. Nobody has reported such a problem. In the past several days I have had many teachers inform me that SETI@home works quite when on machines that also control electronic whiteboards. I think this could fall into the next category of "Bad Reporting."

To be fair to the reporters, it seems the school administrators played up the whiteboard story quite a bit while explaining the firing.